I am a designer and developer and content strategist. I use my experience as a magazine art director and web editor to help publishers, marketers, non-profits and self-branded individuals tell their stories in words and images. I follow all of the technologies that relate to the content business and try to identify the opportunities and pitfalls that these technologies pose. At the same time I am immersed in certain sectors through my content practice and am always looking to find connections between the worlds of neurology, economics, entertainment, travel and mobile technology. I live near the appropriately-scaled metropolis of Portland, Maine, and participate in its innovation economy (more stories at liveworkportland.org. A more complete bio and samples of my design work live at wingandko.com.

Adobe Announces Amazing Suite Of HTML5 Tools In Bid To Merge Open Source And Profit

Adobe Edge Animate effectively replaces Flash as a timeline based rich media composer, but all rendered in HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. All the wacky, animated stuff you used to need Flash for you can now do in Edge Animate. Advertisers and marketers will be especially interested since these animations are scalable, enabling banner ads, for example, to resize dynamically to different screen sizes.

Adobe Edge Reflow builds upon the embryonic responsive design tools in the current Dreamweaver and gives you complete control over breakpoints between different screen sizes, as well as WYSIWYG control over CSS styles and the ability to identify and export all of the relevant bits of code. Reflow is not quite ready for release, but will be a big boon to multi-screen designers (which soon will mean all designers) when it is.

Adobe Edge Code is the first, true contextual text editor. Built on top of the Adobe-sponsored open source project Brackets, Edge Code will seriously make me consider putting aside Coda. Web development is an inherently messy business in which a single web page is composed through reference to many individual CSS and Javascript files. What Edge Code does is enable you to edite the relevant bit of the relevant file right from the place in the html code that references them. Not only is there code hinting, but inline color pickers and font selectors, as well. And you can see the results of your changes with a live WebKit preview. Believe me, this will save developers a lot of time and make designers much more comfortable touching code. An experimental build is available for download now and more features will likely be added before an official release.

Adobe Edge Inspect is the full release of the product (which I wrote about this summer) that started out as Adobe Shadow. Edge Inspect solves the incredibly time-consuming problem of previewing a design on multiple devices. With Edge Inspect, you load an app onto each device you want to test which allows your desktop machine to push the content on its screen to those devices. Not only that, but you can inspect the code on any mobile device as if it were your desktop browser, which takes a lot of the guesswork out of debugging mobile browsers. And a really helpful little bonus, you can instruct the devices to all take screenshots simultaneously and place them on your desktop to make emailed client presentations a snap. This is ready to go now.

Adobe Edge Web Fonts and Typekit make using all manner of fonts on the web easy and in some cases free. Along with building their own service (which now includes access to 1,500 fonts with another 1,000 classic fonts soon to come through an agreement with Monotype) Typekit has also been collaborating with Google for the last couple of years on its web font APIs. The result is a new product, Adobe Edge Web Fonts, that will take all of Google’s fonts and add a selection of Typekit’s fonts (for a total, to start, of 500 fonts) and make them completely free to use on the web—with no restrictions. This is an example of the open source generosity I mentioned above. Jeffrey Veen told the crowd today that he believes not only in making more fonts available through Typekit, but more fonts on the web altogether. 500 free, high-quality fonts with simplified code requirements is certainly a great place to start.

Adobe PhoneGap Build is another time-saver and expertise reducer. Adobe also bought PhoneGap recently, a company that makes software that “wraps” standard web code to make it into mobile apps that behave in most ways like native apps. The additional innovation here is that the “Build” aspect means that PhoneGap can package an app for different platforms (iOS, Android, etc.) without the developer having to set up a dedicated environment on their computer for each of those platforms. Even more than PhoneGap itself, the ability to compile apps in the cloud will lower the barrier for entry into the mobile market considerably. PhoneGap Build is available now as part of the Creative Cloud.

Will these tools change the way that we “Create The Web”? Very likely. The ability to manage all of the bits and pieces of web projects and be able to visually tweak every bit of code will, over time, turn non-coders into coders. And coders may not become better designers (many developers just wish somebody else would do the design) but they will certainly become more productive and have more confidence in doing things they have never done before. The result of all of it will be better looking content on all our devices, which should prompt even better tools from Adobe and others for making even more.

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Michael, what’s different here is that it’s really just a live WebKit preview of normal code. I haven’t worked with it yet, but my impression is that Adobe is not inserting a lot of garbage code like the early WYSIWYG editors (remember PageMill? Probably before your time).

Also, the inspection tools enable you to laser in on the relevant code that is controlling an element, so you don’t have to wade through all of the UI code in the source to see what is going on. I like code as code, too, but this seems on a higher level of visual control than we have seen before.

Good points. I’ve seen way too many websites turn into garbage because of overzealous WYSIWYG editors, so it’s hard for me to trust any of them. However, web development has evolved alot in the past few years, so I can give this one the benefit of the doubt.

My views about it, make sure to read comments and feel free to add to it: http://www.facebook.com/notes/stephane-beladaci/one-code-any-screen-develop-once-deploy-everywhere-is-a-reality/10152672812579068

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And Wouldn’t it be cool if we Sail this ship to calmer seas Turn our backs on bush fires burn. Leave it on the coast

All the promises we’ve been given, given, given All the fires that we’ve feedin’, feedin’, feedin’ All the lies that we’ve been livin’, livin’, livin’ Am I the only one that’s still believin’

I can see you’re in it to go I think we knew this day might come I hope you’ll find what we never ooh Could never seem to love But if you find just one reason to return You’ll find me open arms

All the promises we’ve been given, given, given All the fires that we’ve feedin’, feedin’, feedin’ All the lies that we’ve been livin’, livin’, livin’ Am I the only one that’s still believin’